More on encore careers

An ‘encore career’ was first defined quite specifically to mean a second paid career with personal meaning and social impact at a later stage of life. It was coined by American Marc Freedmen for baby boomers who want to work longer but at a somewhat slower pace and at something socially useful.
Marci Alboher tells her personal story of career reinvention and something of what she has learned since then, in an easy to read New York Times article, A switch at midlife, to make a difference, published in December 2012. The lessons she records are helpful for men and women in their 50s and 60s who are thinking about their work future.
Marci says she was taking a well-earned vacation and said ‘no’ when her boss asked if she would cut her trip short to take care of some work. She found herself looking for a new job, and knew she wanted to do something meaningful. She retrained as a journalist and now she is a vice president with Encore.org. She says the change can be hard work, it can take time – 18 months or more in which there is no income; it can mean retraining – and that too can cost; and it often means less pay than before, once you are earning again.
For her and others this has been well worth the effort but, as Marci points out, good and careful planning for this kind of change is crucial.
Since starting to explore this concept of encore careers I’ve come across a 2002-3 Australian research project by Jane Figgis, for the National Centre for Vocational Education. Jane’s project led to a modified and in some ways broader definition of an ‘encore career’. She found ‘what was imagined was not so much any particular field of work but the nature of that work’. People she spoke to expected it to be paid or unpaid work in which they held a fair degree of control, they wanted the work to be flexible in terms of the hours – leaving space for other activities. It had to involve a serious time commitment (averaging half-time over a year) for several years. And for many, to be attractive, it had to provide opportunity for learning. The project specified that this was about women and men who had reached or passed the age when they became eligible for the age pension.
In my research and interviews with older Australians there were many stories about job changes (see my book Baby boomers: busting the myths ). I asked myself which, if any, of these stories fitted the definitions of Marc Freedman and/or Jane Figgis? I found that while several women and men had taken on or continued to work in socially useful jobs, many had done so before they reached retirement age and others took on work that didn’t necessarily fit the socially useful category. Some were working in a voluntary capacity but not reaching the ‘averaging half–time and for three years’ requirements mentioned in the Figgis report.
Could the phrase ‘encore careers’ be stretched to cover these experiences? What happens if it slides into more general usage, to cover almost any downshift from a main job to something different, something lesser in terms of time and/or level of responsibility by someone in their 50s, 60s or 70s? Does it matter? Are there industrial issues here that would need careful thinking through? [See my previous blog on Encore careers and Doug Jacquier’s comments relating to the encore.org fellowship program] And what happens if employers begin to put pressure on employees to shift to lesser, lower paid jobs? Under what conditions might this be okay? How are those with less power and fewer options protected?
It is good to be having discussions about these and other issues raised by Freeman. I like many of his ideas. I think it is important to acknowledge – as he did in his discussion with Geraldine Doogue Too old to work too young to… on ABC’s Compass – that this time of life needs to be thought of as distinct from old age and from the early to middle years of adulthood. I find his willingness to think differently about work and jobs and how they are structured and designed refreshing. And it is always good to see an awareness that older people too like to learn new things.
Is an ‘encore career’ for you?

Encore careers

American Marc Freedman coined the phrase ‘encore careers’ to describe later-in-life work that combines personal meaning, continued income and social impact. The Wall Street Journal has referred to him as ‘a leading voice in discussions nationwide about the changing face of retirement.’ His books include Prime Time: How Baby Boomers Will Revolutionize Retirement and Transform America and, more recently, The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife. Freedman seeks to translate the concept into practice through Encore.org and ‘building a movement to make it easier for millions of people to pursue second acts for the greater good.’
Undoubtedly this is a laudable and inspiring ambition. It is wonderful to see a program that rests on a positive view of human beings as capable of altruistic behaviour.
Sensibly though Encore.org has reduced the grand vision to construct a program that is solid and achievable. It establishes Encore Fellowships to bring together sponsors, ‘skilled, experienced (baby boomers) professionals’ and not-for-profit organisations to put in place ‘structured assignments’ that will deliver ‘significant, sustained impact to their host organizations’. Typically Fellowships run for six to twelve months, they can be from half to full time and there is a stipend.
The initial program ran in Silicon Valley and Encore.org continues to run the Silicon Valley and New York City Encore Fellows Programs. Independent programs are starting across the US and in London.
In Australia discussions with interested parties are beginning to happen and the Australian contact for the Encore Fellowship Network is Doug Jacquier [contact Doug at dougj147@gmail.com]. The Program deserves serious attention and support.
However, I find some aspects of the program disquieting:
– There is an implication that older workers will happily work for less. Some people can afford to do this but many cannot. Already there are examples of this happening in particular industries – the biggest hardware chain in Australia being the one I heard about most recently. It would be good to see some analysis of what is happening now and what sort of checks and balances are needed to protect older workers and to protect wage levels. Trends should be closely monitored.
– Historically, the not-for-profits sector has been the one to pay relatively lower wages than other sectors and care needs to be taken to make sure there are no unintended flow-on effects in terms of (even) lower salaries and wages or through loss of ongoing positions.
– The program is designed to make use of those older workers who are skilled, experienced professionals. This is a small proportion of the older workforce. Programs like this are not a panacea, they represent a small component of what is needed in order to make it easier for older people who want to continue to work and to be paid a reasonable wage to do so.
– This kind of program will not suit everyone and it is important not to judge harshly those who choose different pathways or who have different priorities.
Finally, I come back to the point I make in my book Baby boomers: busting the myths – that baby boomers are not all the same and that there is a huge downside to making blanket generalisations about a generation.
There is another strand of Encore Career– more of a do-it-yourself model – which I’ll look at next time.

Book launch, the changing workplace & older workers

Baby boomers: busting the myths was launched last Friday at the SA Writer’s Centre. For me it was a wonderful celebration and an opportunity to say thank you to the many people who gave me support along the way.  I was especially delighted that some of the people I’d interviewed were able to be there.

It seems too that what got me started on this project – my unease about how, as organizations restructured, some older workers were being pushed out of jobs they loved with so much as a thank you or goodbye, often to no job at all – touches a chord with others.

I’m interested in the responses because they suggest how complex this issue is if we truly want to make it easier for older people to continue in the workforce.  One woman bemoaned ageism; another guest thought this pushing out of older workers by the younger age group is more or less the natural order of things and to be expected.

Trawling through earlier versions of my work I found this:

When I decided to leave my research position in the CBA Bank in the late 1960’s a colleague took me aside for a serious talk. I was going teaching and this would be my third job in five years. I would look flighty and a bad employment risk, he said. He had been with the bank since leaving school and this was where he intended to stay and build his career.

This was an era when stability was highly valued. Companies rarely changed hands, they planned for the longer term and were satisfied with a reasonable profit margin. Managers rose through the ranks.

Organizations were hierarchical and predictable. Change, when it came, was incremental. As an employee you could look ahead with relative confidence; plan your future.

Men were considered the family breadwinners, they sought full-time permanent positions and many spent all their working life with the same company. Women in work were paid less as a matter of course, many occupations were closed to them and they were expected to leave work when they married and started a family. They aspired to achieve greater equality and job security.

How to do a job was learnt over time, making mistakes along the way, building knowledge and expertise not only about the job but about the organization, where you fitted in and how you got things done. Doing a good job was about doing it well, to a standard. In this world promotion came with seniority because seniority brought with it deeper knowledge, skill and understanding. Loyal, faithful and conscientious service was commended. The end of a long career was often acknowledged with a ‘golden handshake’.

The world of work today is very different. The past 25 years has seen complex economic change that has shifted control of business from management to shareholders interested in short-term financial results; mergers and take-overs became relatively commonplace; and stability became a sign of weakness. The good organization now is dynamic, constantly restructuring, often in turmoil. Change, flexibility and fluidity have become the order of the day. Driving this change becomes the organizational focus, with rather less attention on improving the quality of the product or service.

Technological change speeds communication. New directions and targets flow in an instant from the centre to the periphery. Fast work is good work and good enough will do. While old style jobs exist they are seen as belonging to the past. There is a more ‘independent’ relationship between employer and employee. In this fast-moving world, young bright employees expect to progress rapidly. Staying put can be seen as lack of ambition.

With this emphasis on constant change and constantly shifting tasks, ‘skill’ becomes the ability to do something new rather than having the capacity to draw on previous knowledge and experience. It requires on-the-spot reasoning ability. Here experience over time loses its value, becomes something to be suspicious of, a barrier to change. It is ones potential, ones adaptability in moving from problem to problem, subject to subject, that counts rather than what one knows. [Urban Institute Washington USA researchers, Richard W. Johnson, Gordon B.T. Mermin, and Matthew Resseger, looking at ‘public policy issues of importance to mid-life and older Americans’, in Employment at Older Ages and the Changing Nature of Work (2007) point out that, cognitively, older workers experience a decline in numerical ability and capacity to master new material but that they retain ‘crystallized intelligence’ such as verbal ability and sharper decision-making ability that relies on accumulated knowledge.]

Max Weber likened the old bureaucracies with their rigid structures and inflexible rules to an iron cage. Certainly women were not in the picture.  But that aside, sociologist Richard Sennett in The Culture of the New Capitalism (2006) suggests the reality may not have been so harsh. What it did offer to those in permanent work was what Sennett calls the ‘gift of organized time’; an environment in which it was possible to feel reasonably secure and less anxious about the future. And it offered greater opportunity to do good quality work, to have that acknowledged and valued and to take pride in it.

The baby boomer generation started their working life in the old environment and they leave in the new. No matter how adaptive, how accepting of change, it is not unreasonable to expect that many of us continue to hold fast to older values. And, from this perspective, it is easy to see why ‘modern’ employers might be ambivalent about the value and place of older workers in their organization.